


a long way home

by kay_okay



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Angst, Anxiety, Apocalypse, Blood, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Kissing, M/M, Making Out, Minor Injuries, Minor Violence, On the Run, Running, Trauma, Violence, well more like government overthrow but just squint okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-26 08:44:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19002355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_okay/pseuds/kay_okay
Summary: A line pulls at Dan’s chest from across the room, unwillingly. Dan tugs back. They’re in the middle of a literal war and he’s preoccupied with a schoolyard crush on someone he doesn’t even know.





	a long way home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alittledizzy (dizzy)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dizzy/gifts).



> title lifted from ["alive" by khai](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLEYUpUoaFc). this fic is my super late entry for mandy's birthday challenge, happy birthday [alittledizzy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alittledizzy)! this isn't exactly apocafic but hopefully it comes close enough that you still enjoy it.
> 
> this is a work of fiction. this is a fictional story about fictional representations of real people. none of the events are true. no profit was made from this work. all mistakes left are my own.
> 
> thank you so much to cait [@commonemergency](https://archiveofourown.org/users/commonemergency/) for as usual not only reading this line by line but making sure i didn't throw my laptop out the window when i got frustrated.

 

 

_you can pull me closer_

_or find me when we're older_

_i'll be waiting for you_

  
  
  


Dan feels like he’s been walking for days.

His trainers are almost worn through at this point, a worrying thought that trembles in the back of his mind and that he tries to swipe away like a bee buzzing around his head. He starts a mental rundown of where he thinks a shoe store might be in this neighborhood, maybe just a clothing shop or even a sporting goods shop. He has a distant memory of browsing Amazon late at night on his phone, of the Topman clearance section and even blowing part of his savings every now and then on his designer brands he used to love so much.

The internet seems so far away now. Like another life. One he’s packed up tightly in his heart and locked away, simultaneously scared to re-visit but wanting to feel again so bad.

“Howell, you okay back there?”

Matthew is a group leader of sorts, in that he has an actual printed map of the city and a loud voice, so Dan and the others often follow along with his suggestions. It hasn’t been that long since… since whatever this was, whatever the government opposition group did to cut electricity to the city, to shut off natural gas and water lines, to build a guerilla police force after they started executing people in the streets.

Dan hitches up his black rucksack and tries not to think about the thinning sole on his shoe. Matthew’s okay, he just likes calling people by their last names like he’s some kind of general and the others are his troops and this is some fucked up version of _Call of Duty_ that they can just shut off when they’re done with.

Of course, Dan thinks all this but doesn’t say a word of it.

“Fine,” he answers Matthew shortly. He steps across a fallen tree trunk on the sidewalk, branch catching the torn sole of his shoe, stumbling.

  
  
  


Dan didn’t know anyone else in this group before he became a part of it. The Opposition took control of his neighborhood and it didn’t take long for one of his neighbors to out him, some sort of plea to be spared if they found someone else to interrogate. Instagram screenshots of him in a gay club in London emailed to the Opposition’s conservative leaders, his address and phone number, parent’s names and workplaces. He doesn’t know how they got that last bit but it’s what sent him out his own window in the middle of the night, everything he couldn’t be parted with packed against his back as he shimmied down three stories of ivy-covered fencing.

Matthew he literally fell on top of, misjudged the landing as he was fleeing his flat and crashed into him from above. He heard people calling his name so he tugged Matthew into a shadow under a staircase as the people looking for him ran down the street in the opposite direction.

Matthew hadn’t left him alone since then.

They picked up others as they made their way to the outskirts of the city, the Khan sisters, three of them from fifteen to twenty-three; and Kieran, on holiday from Ireland and just trying to get home.

They all had their reasons to be Opposition targets. Too outspoken, too liberal, too... different. The wrong sexual orientation, the wrong religion, the wrong nationality. The Opposition despised anyone who wasn’t just like them, and made public examples of anyone who tried to stand up to them.

Matthew had a mate in Covent Garden he was trying to get to, somebody he knew from Manchester where he grew up. There was a guy in the group whose mother was in the government and maybe knew what was going on and how the Opposition could be stopped. Dan wasn’t sure what could be done at this point, not with so many leaders gone, but the group clung to any information like their lives depended on it — which, Dan supposed, it did.

The other group is holed up in an abandoned storefront, windows blacked out with plywood and mercifully not smashed in. Matthew wanted to wait until past midnight to set out, easier cover in case anyone in the Opposition was looking for them.

“Nadia—” The Khan sisters are the only ones Matthew calls by their first names. Matthew makes a gesture with his finger for Nadia, the oldest of the three, to move to the back of the group, keeps his voice down. “Bring up the rear.”

Nadia nods and grabs the hand of the youngest, Inaam. They shuffle back, Nadia watching over her shoulder as the group steals through shadows. Their middle sister Rana falls into step next to Dan, puts a hand at her waistband where Dan knows a knife is tucked.

Sometimes it’s gestures like this that remind Dan what’s happened. Before all this, he’d have to struggle to think of someone less equipped to fend physically for himself, to hold his own in a fight or meet someone with aggression if he had to. But a long night of keeping watch with Kieran early on in their run meant a free lesson in how to properly swing a baseball bat to incapacitate someone. Since then, Dan’s felt slightly safer with one strapped to his rucksack.

The street’s deceptively quiet, and Dan doesn’t let that lure him into a sense of security. There’s been too many instances of someone hidden just as well as them, ready to pounce like a cat on a fleeing mouse.

Suddenly, there’s the sound of a scream. A pane of glass shattering, louder shouts from down the street. Dan hears the sound of cars revving their engines, more screams.

The group doesn’t run, just fades back into shadow to assess the situation. The road is narrow and brick-lined, a walkway really, and the small group blends well into the shadows that moonlight throws over eaves and terraces. Eyes and ears trained towards the sound, Dan’s fingers reach behind him to close around the neck of his bat.

But the sounds die away, traveling in the opposite direction from them. The group waits until the street falls into silence again, Matthew nodding and waving his hand.

“Let’s go.”

  
  
  


It was once a home goods shop. Dan thinks he may have even been here before, picked up some of those ridiculously expensive candles that look like hollowed-out rocks and cost fifty quid and smell like the cologne counter at Harrod’s. The windows are boarded up now, nailed to the frame from the outside when the owners ditched it.

The group snakes in a single-file line around the outside, gathers at the back door that butts up next to an alley. There’s a deep overhang they can all fit under, facing mostly blank brick walls and a few darkened terraces. Nadia falls to the back again, eyes pitched up towards the windows looking down at their area of the street as Matthew hits three sharp knocks on the door.

Dan sheets himself out, shoulder pitched into the wood of the door but glancing out over the group. He feels two knocks into the wood, coming from the inside, and Matthew answers back with one.

Code completed, the door swings open and Dan jumps back.

“Matty!”

The face of the person on the other side of the door lights up, flooded with relief, his arms reaching out and tugging Matthew over the threshold. They embrace a long time, swaying slightly back and forth as Matthew tightens his grip.

“Phil. It’s so good to see you.”

  
  
  


Dinner is tinned food, scooped out with plastic spoons from the shop’s employee break room and heated over the hacked-up remains of a wooden display case. Somebody from Phil’s group had enough sense to grab a stack of matchbooks from a nearby abandoned pub on one of their first foraging trips, so in their absence of electricity, they have fire readily available. Luckily it’s warm out, late spring and edging on summer, so the cold hasn’t been a concern.

Dan looks up across the group, eyes landing on Phil. He’s paying Dan no attention, locked in a tight conversation with Matthew, their bodies sheeted toward each other and knees touching. Matthew’s talking animatedly, hands waving and eyes wide, Phil clutching a mug in his fingers, listening intently from behind a pair of thick black-framed spectacles.

He’d seen how tall Phil was when he opened the door for them earlier, eye-level with Dan but nearly a head taller than nearly everybody else in the group. His black hair was mussed, pushed up and away from his forehead, nose an elegant slope that Dan gets a nice view of now, profile perpendicular to the fire as he watches him listen to Matthew. Phil makes a comment about something, and Dan sees the Adam’s apple bob in his throat, one elegant hand unwinding off the mug to gesture in the air.

“See something you like, mate?” A voice pops up next to Dan’s elbow and he jumps, glancing down to see Nadia grinning up at him like the cat that ate the fucking canary.

“Oh, sod off, Nadia,” Dan mutters, shoveling two spoonfuls of tinned mush into his mouth just to give his hands something to do.

“He’s fit,” she charges on, lips pursed and nodding in approval. “You’ve got good taste, Howell.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Dan answers. To make his point he turns his body entirely to the side, facing her dead-on and staring intently into her eyes. “But hey, how’s Kieran?”

“He—” Nadia goes an impossible shade of magenta, deep brown skin flushing like it’s been burnt high up on her cheeks, eyes flashing as she’s thrown into silence. Dan was the only one who’d seen them that night, a few weeks of all being together as a group, quiet whispering on their turn for night watch. He’d woken up after a nightmare, needed the press of fresh air against his lungs and when he’d poked his head outside —

“It was just that one time, you know that,” Nadia's voice is in a panicked whisper.“I don’t even— We haven’t talked about it since then—”

“Nadia, I was just fucking with you,” Dan puts a hand on her arm, she looks harried, cornered. He didn’t mean for it to go this far. He thought they were joking and just having a laugh, and now he regrets saying anything at all. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay Dan, it’s not you. I gotta go.” She makes her exit quick. Kieran catches her eye across the room and Dan’s the only who notices that he follows her out. Dan’s left more confused that he was before, wondering what he said wrong and feeling awful.

When they turn in for the night, two guys from Phil’s group offer to take first watch. They all scatter around the shop, find corners to pile up overcoats and backpacks, makeshift beds out of packing supplies and stacks of rugs found in the storeroom. Dan gets lucky and finds himself the recipient of an overstuffed couch in a model lounge, complete with actual cushions and a throw blanket.

He gets his trainers off, had blissfully forgotten for a few minutes that they’re nearly worn through and gets a harsh reminder when his toe catches on the hole in the canvas. “For fuck’s sake,” he mutters, sticking a fingertip through it.

“That looks bad,” a voice says across the darkened room. Phil’s spreading a blanket out on a fluffy rug on the ground, tossing a giant burlap bag of coffee beans down where Dan presumes he’s going to lay his head. “There’s a shoe shop down the road, I remember passing it on the way here. We can check it out tomorrow.”

Dan stares, inexplicably speechless before he nods, quick and jerky. “Uh-huh,” he says, mouth dry and heart twice its normal rate. “Thanks.”

“I’m Phil, by the way,” he says, leaning over and extending his hand towards Dan. “We should’ve made sure we knew each other’s names when you arrived, but I know your lot’s been traveling a bit so I assumed you were tired and—” Phil talks a bit frantically, one hand still outstretched to Dan’s, so he grabs it to cut him off.

“I’m Dan,” he says. “Thanks for letting us stay here.”

“Our home goods shop is your home goods shop, I suppose.”

Dan laughs, letting their hands drop. Phil sits down at the edge of Dan’s couch, unaware or maybe uncaring that Dan was getting ready for bed. “I’m from Manchester. Matty told me that’s where you went to uni?”

 _Matty._ He’s never going to get used to that. “Yeah, got a law degree. Didn’t do a damn thing with it, though,” Dan answers.

“I went to York and got an English degree, and then a video editing degree which… I’m not sure is coming in really handy these days.”

“Maybe when this is all over you can start a YouTube channel,” Dan quips. They laugh, a bit awkwardly. _Apocalyptic humor,_ Dan thinks. _Awesome._ This journey just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

Phil tells Dan about how he knows the rest of his group, more mates from uni that were living in London now, some co-worker friends. That guy in the group whose mum works in Parliament, he hasn’t been able to get a hold of her but thinks she’s still alive based on underground news. They want to try and make a run for House of Lords in the next few weeks, without any communication it’s hard to know what the situation is like on the ground there.

“Are you going to go too?” Dan asks before he has a chance to filter it through his brain. Phil seems intelligent but doesn’t look like he knows the first thing about fighting face-to-face with someone. To be fair, Dan wouldn’t either, if not for Kieran.

Phil looks thoughtful for a minute, equal parts determined and fearful. He adjusts the glasses on his face, eyebrows creasing.

“I don’t know. If this was a month ago and all just starting, I’d say absolutely not. But the longer time goes on the more I want to do something about it,” Phil finally looks up at Dan. It feels quieter in the room somehow, maybe it is, with people dropping off into sleep and Phil’s voice an octave lower than when they started the conversation. Dan looks back into troubled eyes, conflicted with many paths that all lead into unknown consequences.

“I just can’t sit here and wait for someone else to control my fate,” Phil finally settles on. “But I don’t know what that means for me, either.”

They stare at each other a long time. Normally, this kind of thing would be torture for Dan. But it feels comfortable here, something profound and honest shared between them. It unlocks something in Dan he hasn’t felt in a while, a trust he’s forgotten the sensation of.

He sees Phil’s hand move, his eyes dropping to their fingers pressed parallel into the cushion of the couch. Quickly, with the sound of a voice, it’s tugged away.

“Here, Phil?”

Matthew’s across the room, gesturing to the blanket pile Phil had setup earlier on the floor. He’s toeing his shoes off, unbuttoning his shirt from the bottom up. Dan sees Phil nod from out of the corner of his eye, and then his faces turns to cheerfully look at Dan’s.

“We should probably get some sleep, it’s late. Thanks for the chat.”

Dan’s flushed with embarrassment, heart racing and palms tingling. Why is he embarrassed? He can’t process it fast enough so he just nods back, head jerky, does a dumb little half-wave as Phil gets up and goes to Matthew. _Matty._

Dan keeps getting ready for bed, covertly keeps them in the corner of his eye. Matthew sits down on the blanket like it was made for him, tattooed chest bare and talking animatedly with his hands again. Phil stretches out beside him on his stomach, lines long and lean like a cat, chin propped up on his hands. They put their heads together again, just like earlier, voices too low to carry over the quiet murmurings of everyone else in the shop.

Dan’s lost to them, their little world of Matthew and Phil meant for two, and Dan feels like he’s intruding somehow, face hot with a wave of fresh foolishness, chest tightening and palms tingling, and with all this, a vision of Nadia rushing away from him earlier flickers across his mind.

“God damn it,” he swears under his breath, pressing fingertips into the hollows of his eyes as he lays back against the cushions. He’ll make his apologies to her tomorrow, mind hopefully just marginally clearer after a night of restless sleep.

A line pulls at Dan’s chest from across the room, unwillingly. Dan tugs back. They’re in the middle of a literal war and he’s preoccupied with a schoolyard crush on someone he doesn’t even know.

Dan turns over, faces the black and white crosshatches of the fabric of the sofa. They’re blurry this close up, lines blending together into intersections of thread, colours graying together as he tracks his eyes. He starts counting squares in the pattern, wraps his arms around himself as he tries to get further under the blanket.

He gets into the hundreds of squares before his eyes feel heavy enough to close, even longer before the voices behind him drop off entirely as he falls into sleep.

  
  
  


A week later, it’s Dan’s turn to go foraging. The longer the Opposition stays in power, the thinner supplies get on the ground as more people go into hiding or try to flee the city. He hears snippets of news from other members in the group who make contact on their own trips outside — one day it’s that the Opposition is losing traction, the next it’s that they’ve taken another city. When Dan heard the rumour they’d made it to the southern suburbs, where his family is, he’d found a darkened back room to hide in until his breathing returned to normal and his hands stopped shaking.

Rana finds some duct tape in a drawer in the store room and brings it out to Dan while he’s getting his pack together, early in the morning. When he looks at it questioningly, she points down at his trainers.

“Those are actually embarrassing, Dan. And how do you even walk in them?”

“Don’t we have more important things to worry about?” Dan grumbles, sitting back on the couch that’s become his bed, shoving his toe back in through the mangled canvas at the edge of his sole. “Isn’t the world ending out there or something?”

Rana doesn’t answer, just sits next to him, yanking at his foot until he surrenders and it’s in her lap.  She pulls two arm-lengths of tape off the roll, cuts it with a rip across her teeth. Wrapping it swiftly around the shoe, she closes up the hole and effectively welds Dan’s feet to his trainers.

His eyes are comically wide as he tries to tug his leg away like she’s some sort of mad scientist. “Rana, what the fuck—”

“At least there’s no more hole, right?” She says, tapping on the top of the shoe. “Airtight.”

“So I’ll have you to thank when I lose circulation in my feet and they have to get amputated? Fuck’s sake—”

“You can’t be worrying about your shoes while you’re out today. Didn’t you see who your partner is?”

There’s a board up in the employee break room with days of the week, everybody partnered up on different foraging dates based on comfort wielding a weapon. Dan’s semi-nightly batting practice with Kieran paid off, which got him paired with somebody who not only isn’t comfortable holding a weapon but probably _couldn’t_ without dropping it. Several times.

“Mm-hmm,” Dan fakes disinterest, fails miserably. Rana looks far too cheerful, the same all-knowing grin Nadia wears across her dark features as she rips another strip of tape, layers it on top of the others around Dan’s trainer.

Phil chooses that moment to come around the corner, pack in hand, denim jacket on, hair pushed up in a haphazard quiff.

“You ready?” He asks brightly, adjusting his glasses.

Dan stares blankly too long, brain moving too slowly, and Rana bangs her fist down on his shin. He cries out in pain and shoots her a withering glare that she returns with a shrug.

“Um, yeah, give me like two minutes, okay?”

Phil looks nonplussed, nods a bit and shoves off back around the corner. “Jesus bleeding Christ—” Dan cries out, rubbing his shin.

Rana takes no notice, pushes his foot off her leg and pats him on the head as she stands. “Promise me you’ll make a move already? I made a bet with Inaam you’d cave to his charm and declare your love for him before the summer ended.”

 _And now they’re betting on his love life????_ Dan has to forcibly close his jaw twice before he can reply. “Not to gloss over the fact that you and your sisters are gambling on my literal emotions for sport, but you know he’s with Matthew, right?” He’d been sleeping across from them for a week, within ten feet of them twenty-four hours a day, he knew what he saw. He kept his distance as much as he could, ate his meals with the Khan sisters and talked Formula 1 with Kieran at night, tried to fill up his mornings with reading the books he found in displays and in the employee break room.

Rana’s face falls, her head slightly shaking. She looks older than seventeen suddenly, harder and wiser and utterly disappointed. “Oh, Dan. Maybe you are as hopeless as my sister thought,” she stands suddenly, his foot dropping out of her lap with a _thud_ back onto the floor. “I’m going to try to get my money back.”

  
  
  


He’s never seen the city this quiet.

It’s not like a middle of the night quiet, streets dark but ambient noise still percolating — trucks with their morning run deliveries in the distance, drunk pub-goers crawling home, the hum of electricity through high-strung wires. The sounds that Dan heard when he couldn’t sleep, bedroom windows propped open until the city noises rocked him back to sleep like a lullaby.

This is eerie silence. Cold, five-a.m. silence that feels unforgiving. A cavernous sound of so much nothing that there’s not even any birdsong, just lifeless trees lining the streets in pale blue morning light.

“Let’s go this way,” Phil suggests, nodding his head at some abandoned storefronts, windows smashed in and bins overturned. They’ve learned to take paths that already look broken so they can hide easier if needed.

Dan nods and follows, fist closing around the neck of his baseball bat.

The first few shops they hit are busts, a mostly-empty clothing store and a mobile phone shop, looted long ago from the looks of it. Dan steps tentatively over the broken glass, crystals cracking under his feet as he peers in. He lets out a surprised noise.

“I came here once to buy an iPhone,” he says, absently and incredulously and not expecting an answer. He thinks it sounds stupid saying it out loud but he can’t help it, it’s everyday things turned upside down like this that remind him of everything going on. He hears Phil sidle up next to him, looking around at the destroyed shop, the overturned till, the displays pried open and electronics long gone.

“Sometimes it doesn’t feel real,” Phil murmurs.

Dan thinks of getting his mum’s address messaged to him on Twitter by an opposition account, the pounding on his door the night he fled his flat out the window, the sounds of screaming he’d hear nightly when the group was on the run.

“Sometimes it’s more real than anything I’ve ever felt,” Dan replies softly.

When Dan looks over at Phil, he’s closer than Dan realises. In his space, Phil’s looking at him intently, bright blue eyes unusually muted and expression open. His eyebrows furrow in a silent question.

“My mum, they…” He hasn’t talked to anybody about any of this, he’s not sure why. Talking about it out loud seems to make it more real, lay it down in cement or etch it in tree trunks when he’s not ready to recognise the truth yet.

Dan can’t look Phil in the eye anymore. He barely knows him but his eyes are so kind they actually hurt. He wants to pour his heart out for some reason, crack the pressure release and let everything come spilling out for any kind of relief.

“The Opposition, they sent me messages on all my social media accounts. The same thing over and over, cut and pasted hundreds of times. _We know who you are, Daniel Howell, we know where you live, we know your brother, we know your mum_. They sent me their addresses and then in case they thought I needed more proof, they sent me photos from outside their windows.”

Phil’s still listening, the same intent expression he looks at Matthew with every night. Fuck, Matthew. Matthew, who even though can be a dick sometimes, took him in when shit got too real and stuck with Dan this whole time.

“They made good on their promises though, came for me one night after somebody sent them photos of me and my ex-boyfriend. Told me all the things they’d do to _someone like me._ ”

Phil takes his hand. Dan’s limbs feel numb and he almost doesn’t feel it, save for the gentle squeeze of fingers around his.

“I haven’t been back since. I don’t know where my mum is, my brother’s supposed to be at uni, but…”

Dan hears his own voice crack before he feels it. It happens quick, and unexpectedly, in the same breath, Phil’s tugging at the line of his hand, bringing him gently against his chest.

Hugs usually make him freeze up. His mum would always tease him that it felt like hugging a tree every time he visited, stiff and dry as a board and with about as much warmth as one, too. But it didn’t matter. She’d hang on and rub his back and Dan would raise a hand in a robotic patting motion just to appease her into loosening her grip, and they’d laugh about it.

Something about this feels like that. Phil doesn’t let go, both arms wound soundly and solidly around Dan, whose chest has constricted in some tragic cocktail of anxious and worried and depressed and scared. Tears prick his eyes. They feel burning hot and foreign, spill over in two tears across his cheeks without any effort at all. He doesn’t know how long they stand there, Phil’s arms around him, eyes unfocused, world around them paused even just for a minute.

Dan gets an elbow between them. He doesn’t push Phil away, but he’s not gentle about unraveling himself from his arms, either.

“Let’s just get what we can and get out of here,” Dan says. He turns his head in a feeble attempt to wipe his face off without Phil seeing.

Phil is polite enough to abstain from comment, just nods and follows Dan back out through the door.

  
  
  


Through dinner around their fire, Dan’s quieter than normal. Rana’s talking his ear off on one side of him, Nadia on the other braiding Inaam’s hair and rolling her eyes at every other thing Rana says. Kieran’s telling a story to four of the guys from Phil’s group. Dan can’t tell what it’s about but there’s a lot of hand gesturing and laughing.

“I’m gonna get some air,” Dan cuts off Rana mid-sentence, puts down the Pyrex bowl he’s eating out of and stands up. She looks offended for a minute, unnoticed by Dan, but Nadia shoots her a look that silences her and lets Dan leave without another word.

He makes it out to the back door where two guys from Phil’s group are keeping watch. He thinks one of them is called Mickey, he remembers because the guy barely clears five-feet so Dan immediately thought of Mickey Mouse. Then again, everybody’s well below your eye level when you’re 6’4”.

“You on now, mate?” One of the guys asks in a thick, sing-songy Geordie accent.

“I can be,” Dan answers. “Just want some air.”

The two look relieved for a break, and Dan takes a seat on one of the overturned breeze blocks they vacate. He stares up at the sky, darker than it usually is with less light pollution from the streets below. Most of the shops and apartments are dark now, occupants fled or hiding or… worse.

His flat had a balcony, it overlooked a sad excuse for a garden in his building, but it was something. Dan had a little wicker chair out there, a tiny side table he’d rescued off the pavement the first summer he moved in, his first proper flat on his own. He didn’t smoke or play guitar or anything else somebody might do out on a balcony but he did read, fantasy novels and novels about European philosophers who had a bleaker outlook on life than he did back then. Nowadays, he thinks they might’ve been onto something with all of it.

Dan turns over another block with his foot, props the soles of his worn-through shoes up on it and hugs his knees to his chest. He hears footsteps approaching and thinks it might be Rana or Nadia come to check on him, so he preps himself to put on a neutral face and pretend like everything’s fine.

“Out here all alone?” A voice asks, and it’s the last person he’d expect to see.

Matthew pulls up a block and sits next to him. It’s been a few weeks now since they’ve been at the shop, and probably that long since Dan’s been in the same space with him for more than a _morning, Howell_. Matthew being so glued to Phil’s side has meant Dan’s let them have their space, out of respect for them or out of preservation for himself, he can’t really say.

“Just wanted some air,” Dan says, again. It seems like a safe, neutral response and so far it’s been working to curb the concerned looks or questioning glances.

“Mm-hmm,” Matthew says, totally unconvinced, and Dan knows it’s now officially stopped working. He steals a glance at Matthew, curly black hair getting longer by the day and nearly falling into his face now, unkempt and unruly and held back by a hastily-tied piece of string.

Dan doesn’t try to lie his way out of anything or make up a story, just opts for sitting quietly in their shared space and listening to the wide silence around them. Matthew twirls a strand of curly hair around his finger while he waits, fidgets a little searching for the next thing to say.

“You shouldn’t be here alone, you know,” Matthew finally comments. “You should always have a partner whenever you’re out.”

Dan nods, eyes still trained out across the backlot of the shop. _Well you’re here now, aren’t you_ or _What are you, my keeper_  bite nastily at his tongue, but he’s too tired to fight, too depressed to be agitated. He lets everything go as quickly as he let it upset him.

“Sorry,” he settles for, in a flat voice. It doesn’t appease Matthew.

“You think I haven’t noticed something’s been bothering you since we’ve got here?” Matthew asks. He turns to look at Dan square in the eyes for the first time since he came out here, brows furrowed around dark eyes, “You’ve not said ten words to me these past weeks.”

Dan’s face grows hot again. Matthew’s words don’t have any bite to them, but they’re not inaccurate. He’s been giving Matthew and Phil a wide berth of space, spent a lot of time avoiding exploring exactly _why_. He hadn’t wanted to pull at that thread.

“Sorry,” he tries again.

“Dan,” Matthew levels at him. It’s an _enough._

Dan looks away, a deep breath down towards the duct tape holding his shoes together. “You guys just seemed a little… Wrapped up in each other.”

It’s the most diplomatic thing he can think of, and it took him a solid minute to come up with it. He looks back at Matthew when the quiet’s gone on for too long.

He’s smiling, proper wide grin with his eyes small and teeth showing and everything. He looks on the verge of a laughing fit.

“What?” Dan asks, “What’s so funny?”

“ _Mate,_ ” Matthew says, and he shakes his head, runs a hand through his hair, kicks his foot up on a breeze block, looks incredibly cool for some reason. “Mate.”

“ _What???”_ Dan nearly shrieks.

“Phil and I are friends. That’s it,” Matthew’s fully laughing now, cheeks pinked and smiler wider than Dan has literally ever seen. “This is what you’ve been stressed about? Dan, why didn’t you tell me?”

Dan’s eyesight is spinning. He feels like he did that time when he was eight and got hit in the face with a football in school and couldn’t see straight for an hour. “What?” He asks again. “What’re you—”

Matthew lets out a gusty laugh, wipes his eyes because apparently Dan’s personal life is so fucking hilarious that he’s actually crying. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to laugh. Yes, Phil and I are very close. But we’ve been friends since primary school, we grew up together, all that. He was there for me when my parents went through their nasty divorce, when my sister got pregnant at eighteen, when I took too many pills by mistake one night and made him drive me to A&E because I didn’t want my mum to know…”

He’s not laughing anymore. Matthew’s eyes get darker somehow, the lines around his face slack. Dan feels like he’s holding his breath, sits perfectly still so as to not disrupt anything.

Matthew plays with the earring in his ear, a small silver hoop that he twirls through the hole. “He’s a good man, Phil Lester. The best I know.” He finally turns, locks his eyes on Dan’s. “And he cares about you.”

Dan feels like he gets punched in the stomach, lets a stuttered breath out he didn’t know he’d been holding in. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting Matthew to say, but it wasn’t that.

“Matthew, I… Phil doesn’t even know me.”

Matthew doesn’t answer for a long time. His eyes regard the darkened buildings around the parking lot they’re in, the scattered gravel of the pavement, his fingers trace along the swirls of tattoos on his arms. Dan follows the trails, watches the stubby and calloused fingertips of Matthew’s hand dance along brightly-coloured ink. He remembers quite suddenly that Matthew’s a musician. He had a band once, he told him, friends from secondary school that would get together in somebody’s back garden and practice on the weekends. It never went anywhere, but Matthew still had pages and pages of writing back in journals in his flat, just brought one small one with him here when he had to flee.

Dan would see him some nights there in the beginning when it was just the two of them, hunched over the leatherbound book writing small and cramped, saving space to last for a journey with an unknown end date.

“Sometimes I want to write something and I can never do it, you know? I think and think and think but nothing…” Matthew makes a gesture like writing on paper. “Nothing.”

Dan looks up at him.

“And sometimes it just…” Matthew spreads his hands out, smooths the air in front of him. “It just happens. The words flow out so fast my hand can’t even keep up. I read it over and it’s exactly what I wanted. It feels right.”

Dan can’t answer. He knows what Matthew’s getting at.

“I know him, mate. And you may not think it, but I know you, too.”

Dan doesn’t know what to do with that information. So he stares, unmoving, until Matthew gets up from his seat and leans down, kisses sweetly into the curly mop at the top of Dan’s head.

“You stay out here. I need to go settle a bet with Rana.”

“ _Are you fucking kid_ —” But when Dan turns, he’s already gone.

  
  
  


Dan stews. _He cares about you._ It bounces around in his head. That could mean a lot of things. Dan cares about a lot of people. His mum, his brother. His…

God, is that it? Does he really not care about anybody else in his life? A grim realisation starts to work its way up his spine, but before he’s had time to start unpacking that, yet another voice comes through the back doors of the shop.

“Hey.”

Phil’s stood in the frame, jumper hood up and sleeves pulled down over his hands like paws. He looks folded in a little, tentative, one hand holding a small box.

“Hey.”

“Busy?” Phil asks, somewhat reflexively. He even cringes as he says it.

Dan waves his hand to the pitch-black of the shop’s parking lot. “Swamped.”

Phil grins, taking up a seat where Matthew had been before. His posture’s different, hesitant, maybe a little shy. He wasn’t like this when they first met, and Dan feels a little of it too, awkward and uncertain after Matthew’s talk and a head full of new information.

Phil holds the box out, presses the edge against Dan’s knee. “For you.”

Dan looks down at it, takes the box into his hands with shock. “Me?”

Phil just smiles, folds his arms a little. It’s chilly tonight, and pretty soon Dan’s thin long-sleeve isn’t going to cut it. He opens the box carefully, flips the hinged lid and moves aside crumpled tissue paper.

“I guessed forty-four?” Phil’s voice goes up in a question. “I hope it’s right, it’s the only size they had in this style, and I thought it kind of looked like the ones you had, not entirely the same of course…”

Dan’s hearing vignettes, his eyes tunnel on the pair of shoes in front of him, wrapped neatly in their tattered box. They’re black high-tops, much like the ones he has now, but brand new and with a zipper down each side. Laces still in their plastic packaging are stuffed in the side, hidden under tissue paper.

It’s so stupid, but they smell incredible. Something new and clean and like Dan hasn’t had in months, something that reminds him of his old life and when things weren’t like some horrific cross between _The Walking Dead_ minus the zombies and _V for Vendetta_ minus the head-shaving. He wants to cry for some reason. For a lot of reasons.

“Do… Do you like them? Are they okay?”

Dan pushes the box into Phil’s lap, braces his hand on the wobbly block, and leans in to press his lips fully to Phil’s.

  
  
  


He counts it a win when Phil’s body relaxes, when his hands reaches up to hold Dan’s face against his own, when the shoebox slides out of Phil’s lap and crashes onto the pavement.

Dan leans into it, arches his back when Phil’s hands slide down his neck and his arms wrap around Dan’s shoulders, bringing him closer. Dan parts his lips and Phil sighs into it, fingers tugging at the soft, curly hair at the back of Dan’s neck.

Dan’s heart’s racing again, pounding against his rib cage with the thought of this all happening, his mind trying to catch up to everything they’re doing out here in the silence, the sound of their lips ebbing and flowing together like fanfare in his ears. The hand leaning on the breeze block grips hard, and before he knows what’s happening, it skids.

The block wobbles, enough to break their kiss but thankfully not send them flying and down to the pavement. Phil’s eyes go comically wide, he grips to Dan’s shoulders to hold him up and suddenly they’re pressed chest-to-chest, Dan’s hands on Phil’s thighs.

There’s really nowhere to go without falling. Dan stays put, a nose-length away from Phil’s face.

“So,” he starts. He’s breathless, lips kiss-stung and tingling. “Hi.”

Phil just grins. His eyes shuttle back and forth between Dan’s, sparkling and blue. “Hey.”

He’s not sure how much longer they stay out there after they get themselves re-situated. They put aside the cement blocks and find a tarp stashed under an abandoned car that they pull out, sit on side by side, shoulder to shoulder. They spend the rest of the night learning as much as they can about each other. Where they grew up, how they got to London, what life was like before the Opposition.

Dan learns he loves the feel of Phil’s hands in his own, the taste of his lips and the sound of the breathy laughs he lets out when Dan kisses at the curve of his jaw, just under his earlobe. Dan’s voice goes high when Phil tips his head back and takes in soft mouthfuls at his neck, so Phil keeps doing it.

It’s late, or maybe early, when they settle against each other, their backs leaning against the hard brick of the building. Pale blue light paints the horizon, the sun’s soft orange barely visible beyond the trees.

Dan’s nearly already asleep, forehead pressed into Phil’s collarbone. The wide circles Phil had been painting with his hand on Dan’s back lulled him into submission, the welcome weight of Phil’s arm around his body like a security blanket.

“Let’s go to bed,” Phil murmurs into Dan’s hair. And for a split second, Dan feels like he’s back in his flat. Maybe they fell asleep in his lounge playing video games or watching a movie or something else inconsequential, and his bed, his real bed, is waiting for them just steps away. Clean pillows and a fluffy duvet, miles of sheets to get lost under together.

He holds the memory when he stands up, Phil’s arm not leaving his side as it winds around Dan’s waist to help him up.

“I have the most comfortable bed in the world,” he says sleepily. “I really hope you get to sleep in it someday.”

He’s too tired to hear Phil’s chuckle but he feels it, feels Phil bend down to pick up Dan’s shoebox and stick it under his other arm. They make their way back inside slowly, quietly, as they know the rest of their group are all sound asleep.

They turn the corner to their area of the shop, and Dan’s eyes land on Matthew, curled up and sleeping like a kitten on Dan’s couch. He stares for a good thirty seconds before his eyes focus and he understands what’s going on.

“Bitch stole my couch,” he mutters, still half-asleep, frowning down at Matthew looking angelic and serene. He hears Phil chuckle this time, who just takes his hand and pulls him towards his own sleeping area.

“Stay with me, then?” Phil asks. Dan nods, already stepping out of his shoes and pulling his shirt off, awkwardness and pretense absent with the primal need to get horizontal and back to sound asleep, immediately.

He tugs open the duvet and climbs under it, cheek pressed against the bag of coffee beans and knees bent as he lays on his side. Phil ditches his own shoes and shirt, slides under to lay parallel to Dan’s inviting posture.

“Here,” Dan murmurs, down to single syllables now as he pulls at Phil’s arm until it’s around him and he can lean his head on Phil’s chest. His arm slings around Phil’s waist, knees pressing into Phil’s thighs. “Sleep. Now. Okay?”

“Okay,” Phil says softly, still smiling. He runs a hand across Dan’s arm, and whispers. “Good night, Dan.”

“Yeah,” Dan murmurs, fully asleep now. “Good. A good night.”

  
  
  


In close quarters like this, secrets aren’t a thing anymore. Everybody knows about Dan and Phil sleeping in the same place before either of them even wake up the next morning.

The jokes get poured on early by the rest of the group, but thankfully for Dan, they taper off by dinner. Phil doesn’t seem to mind at all, cheeks a permanent pink but otherwise he keeps himself within arm’s length, sitting next to Dan at lunch or lacing their fingers together as they read a magazine on the floor in the early evening, heads perpendicular on the same pillow.

Something about Matthew’s conversation cracked something open in Dan. He lets himself feel again, even if it’s unnatural, the ever-present need to close himself off slowly dissipating. He tries to push through the self-doubt, to accept the friendships from people in the group, to see what happens.

But mostly, he tries to accept everything from Phil.

The sounds outside seem to get louder and closer. The Opposition seems to attack nightly around them, and the group has switched to having three in night watch instead of two. Supplies are going thin in the neighborhood as more people flee, and Dan notices the gap between his waistband and his belly getting larger.

When a week turns into two and three, Dan realises they’ve been at the shop two months now. Kieran started teaching Inaam how to wield a baseball bat. Phil’s mates lay down plans of moving their group towards Westminster, nearer to the House of Lords. It makes Dan nervous to hear them talk about it, and Phil holds him a little closer every night. He tells Dan he still doesn’t know if he plans to join them whenever they decide to leave.

They whisper in the dark every night, thoughts and confessions and secrets meant for two laid side-by-side on the thinning duvet. Dan sleeps the longest he has since he’s been away from his flat.

Nadia finds Dan when she’s getting ready to go foraging one morning. Inaam is in the employee break room with Kieran taking practice swings with Dan’s bat, Matthew and Phil on watch keeping them company.

“The guys are talking about leaving tonight,” she tells him quietly, referring to Phil’s group. “Kieran said they asked him to go with them.”

Dan looks up, tries to quiet the racing of his heart. “Tonight?” He says.

Nadia nods. “Kieran’s not going. That’s all I know,” she speaks quickly as she sees Kieran and Inaam come back in through the hall. She grabs their packs and stands, leaving Dan behind her bewildered and confused.

Phil and Matthew trail in behind them. Matthew and Rana offer to go foraging with the girls, and as they leave, Phil’s friends gather in the break room, bringing Kieran in with them.

Suddenly left alone in the main area of the shop, Dan feels a bit awkward with Phil given what knowledge Nadia just dropped on them. Phil doesn’t pick up on it though, as he takes advantage of the empty room and lays down next to Dan.

“You okay?” He asks, when Dan doesn’t say anything for a few beats.

He can see Phil looking at him but he stares up, says his words towards the ceiling. “Did you know your mates are planning to leave for Westminster tonight?”

The hesitation tells Dan all he needs to know. He leans up on his elbow.

“You know? Why didn’t you tell me? Are you going to go with them?”

“I don’t know,” he tells Dan, truthfully. “I don’t know if I can just keep waiting here for something to happen.”

“Phil, you’ve heard the attacks out there getting closer. It’s not safe to try and move now. If we just wait, something will happen to stop all this, someone will come.” Dan doesn’t want to admit his voice has gone into a panic, his heart racing, doesn’t want to admit he doesn’t wholly believe the words even as they come out of his mouth.

Phil doesn’t answer. Dan doesn’t know if it’s because he doesn’t know what to say, or doesn’t want to say what he really feels. But he turns on his side, slides a palm around the knobby corner of Dan’s hip and tugs. Dan goes, too weak to resist.

Phil pulls until he can get his arms around Dan’s middle, until Dan’s forehead presses into the center of his chest and he can feel the bare skin of Dan’s back against his palms. Dan folds his arms in and lets himself be enveloped, soft and willing this time, warm with love and shaking with fear.

“I hope you’re right, Dan,” Phil says quietly into the crown of Dan’s head, doesn’t bother to hide the tears that slide into brown curls.

Dan doesn’t bother to hide them, either.

  
  
  


The next thing Dan hears is the sound of the back door slamming, dropping him awake.

Then it’s voices — loud, louder than they’ve been in two months, and talking over each other. Phil’s already on his feet and helping up Dan, dizzy with being yanked out of sleep and adrenaline coursing through his veins.

“ _It’s Rana!_ ” Nadia’s voice yells, and she comes around the corner, Rana’s tiny frame crumpled between her and Matthew, face pitched back and eyes rolled into her head, chin-length black hair matted with blood. Dan’s stomach is immediately around his ankles, hand pushing against Phil to get him to them faster, Phil’s mates clearing off the table in the break room with a loud clatter, getting Rana laid out flat up on the table.

Blood, there’s so much blood and it’s everywhere, in trails down her face from her hairline, in angry splatters against her clothes, pooling at the bow of her collarbone as she coughs, clutching her rib cage. Dan realises he’s still holding the blanket he and Phil were sleeping on and he brings it up, uses it to start mopping blood off Rana’s face and neck.

“They were already in the shop when we snuck in the back,” Nadia says, pressing another t-shirt into the gaping wound in Rana’s scalp. “They had knives, bats…” her voice cracks and her hands shake as she tries to stop the bleeding with one hand, holds Rana’s shoulder with the other, like she’s making sure Rana’s still physically here. “Rana got in a fist fight with one of them, we tried to fight them off but they were bigger, stronger, I…”

Phil edges in slowly around Dan, takes the shirt from Nadia and keeps the pressure on the wound. Matthew, silent up to this point, unwinds an arm from Inaam and Nadia falls into it. Kieran takes his shirt off, runs it under the thankfully-still-working faucet and rings it out, helps Dan get the blood out of Rana’s eyes and wordlessly gives her his hand to squeeze.

It’s a scene fraught with panic, loud and amplified around the tiny room. Inaam’s crying into Matthew’s shirt, Nadia’s incoherently telling the story of what happened, Rana moaning in pain, Phil’s mates talking angrily and loudly amongst themselves about making them pay, making whoever did this feel pain, making this whole movement stop.

Dan’s eyes catch Phil’s amongst the chaos. He’s calm and centered, pressure on Rana’s head firm but talking quietly to her, murmuring that she’ll be okay and he knows it hurts but it’ll be over soon. He sees Dan looking up at him and presses his other hand over Dan’s fingers, wordlessly.

Dan grips them back. He holds on for dear life, Phil’s eyes stricken as they stare into Dan’s. _Don’t leave me,_ Dan’s eyes say to Phil. _Don’t risk yourself. Don’t risk this._

He doesn’t get an answer from Phil, the sound of breaking glass in the front of the shop drowning out the last of coherent thoughts in Dan’s head.

“Fuck,” Matthew says, “ _Fuck, fuck, fuck,_ ” and in a second he’s got Rana scooped up into his arms off the table as he bolts down the hallway to the back door, Phil running alongside them, other hand gripping tight to Dan’s as everyone falls in line behind them. It’s chaos, fucking madness, and everybody scrambles. Kieran cuts across the group, takes Inaam from Nadia’s arms and grips her hand as they run. They make it out into the parking lot in a single file, Phil’s mates bringing up the rear of the group. When Dan steals a glance back he sees them piling against the door to hold it shut.

“Go!” They shout, “We’ll hold them off!”

Rana’s gripped the shirt against her own head by now, Phil’s hand slipping off as he turns to look. He hesitates, and Phil’s friend notices.

“Phil, go! We’ll find you! _Get them out of here!_ ”

It’s only a moment longer he waits, a moment that stretches on for hours. Dan stares at them, struggling against the door, heart pumping against his rib cage harder and harder with every second. Suddenly he feels Phil’s fingers lace tightly around his own, his arm being pulled as Phil takes off into the night after the group.

Dan’s hand holds to him tight. They run hard up the pavement, up the alley perpendicular to the shop and Dan forces himself not to stop and turn around when they hear screams behind them. Shouting from Phil’s mates, overlapped with voices he doesn’t recognise. He just forces his feet to move faster towards the running figures ahead of him.

“Don’t let go of my hand,” Phil shouts behind him, but he can’t stop what happens next.

He blames it on tunnel vision, on pure adrenaline running through him that makes him not aware of his surroundings. Dan’s so concerned with running forward that he doesn’t look to the side, misses the two cars coming down the road filled with members of the Opposition.

One of the cars swerves, narrowly miss them, but his hands go up in defense out of reflex. He drops Phil’s fingers from his own, slipping out easily from the blood and sweat they’re covered in.

It happens fast, the men opening the car doors to box Phil in and holding knives and bats, long steel pipes and boards with nails in them, and then there’s Dan’s hoarse voice cracking the otherwise-silent night air — _“Phil!”_

He shouts it, his voice sounding like it’s coming up from the bottom of a well, a cry for help desperate for anyone to hear. Matthew has turned around by now, farther up the road, Rana still clutched in his arms as he watches the men wrestle Phil into their car. His eyes go wide as saucers, and Dan hears him shout Phil’s name, too.

Phil’s struggling against the men and they start to drive away before they’ve even got the doors shut. It’s all happening so fast, and Dan can’t keep up, can only keep shouting — Phil’s name, and _stop_ and _don’t_ and _please._

The door of the first car slams shut as it drives away, and he sees Phil against the window, fingers that were just holding Dan’s covered in blood and pressed against glass, clawing to get out. Dan keeps yelling, running towards the car, but another blocks his path.

Matthew’s reached him by now, and Dan doesn’t realise he’s fallen into gravel trying to avoid the car, hard rocks scraping against the thin material of his jeans, tearing up the edges of his new black hi-tops. Matthew grabs him by the upper arm with his free hand, tries to get him to stand, “We have to go, Dan, now,” and he can tell he’s crying. All these weeks with Matthew and he’s never heard him cry and that’s the sound that knocks reality into Dan, that Phil’s gone, that they have to run, that this is all happening.

Dan feels his chest caving in, edges crumbling one pebble at a time. A rockslide of pain falls down, deep down into his heart, crushing it against his insides. He brings a hand up against the sensation to make sure his bones are still there, holding everything together.

The men in the car are laughing hysterically. They get back into their seats and drive away in the same direction as the first car, peel away as their tires screech and Dan watches them disappear down the road, palms gripping so tightly at the gravel that he can feel the sharpness of rocks under his nails.

 _he’s dead,_ is all Dan can hear twirling in his head, _he’s dead and i let him go. he asked me not to let him go and i did. he’s dead because of me. because of me._

“Dan,” Matthew’s pleading now, voice broken, panicked, “We have to go.”

He looks up and in the distance, sees the small group of Phil’s mates break their wall as the Opposition pushes through the back door of the shop. Dan knows this is why Matthew’s so insistent, why he’s pulling at Dan’s arm hard enough to nearly sprain it.

When Dan finally gets to his feet, Nadia and Kieran have made their way back over and help Matthew in pulling at him. His legs somehow break into a run. He doesn’t know how they’re moving, his brain surely isn’t online enough whatsoever to know how to run right now. Dan only knows that he’s somehow keeping up with them, eyes blinded by tears and sweat and blood.

Kieran, with Inaam still in his arms, makes sharp turns around corners and behind more abandoned buildings. She clutches around his neck, long black plait of her hair bouncing as he runs. The group follows him every step of the way, until they make a sharp right into a 10-by-10 tool shed outside a shop, through broken-out window that’s not boarded up.

“Get in,” Kieran says, clutching to Nadia’s hand as she jumps through. He hands over Inaam, Matthew hands over Rana, and Nadia takes both of them quickly but gently. Kieran helps Matthew jump in, then grabs Dan’s hand.

Dan feels the glass cutting into his hands when he grips the edge of the frame. It pinches like tiny ant bites, exploding in small spots of fire across his palm, fresh blood leaking out of them. His shoes slip on the pane when he boosts himself up, but he shifts his body weight forward to fall onto his knees into the tiny storage shed.

Matthew reaches through to bring Kieran in, who hops over and finds a discarded plane of wood on the floor to hold over the open window frame. There’s a workbench against one wall, and Matthew finds a handful of nails and some hand tools along its top, using the broad end of a shovel to drive nails into the wall, holding up the plywood. Dan and Nadia hold it up as Matthew hammers it up, Kieran carrying Rana and pulling Inaam by the hand to the farthest point away from the window as possible. They get settled in a corner, Kieran laying out Rana gently, who’s still clutching the shirt to her head and moaning in pain.

It all happens fast, less than thirty seconds to get through the window and the wood up against the broken window. Nadia leaves Dan and Matthew to hold up the panel in case someone tries to break it from the outside. She runs to the back wall, drops down to her knees when Inaam hurls herself at her.

Dan stares straight forward, arms trembling. He can’t look at Matthew, can’t see the hurt in his eyes, can’t let a small shard of reality or anything that’s just happened find its way into his consciousness now. He lets the sound of Nadia calming down Inaam fade to the background, Kieran murmuring softly to Rana, Matthew’s shaky, muttered curses simmering in his mind down to nothing. His mind clears.

Dan holds the board up with steady hands, watches the patterns of the wood grain purl in intricate curlicues from behind swimming eyes. This he can manage. This he can time his breaths to.

  
  
  


A week later, the Opposition is overthrown.

The attack comes from inside the British government, a small group of leaders joining forces with outer-cities allies to take down the hate group. The Opposition leaders are arrested and within days, nationwide communications and electricity returns.

When the police do rounds of the city, they send in teams to shepherd out the people who had fled into hiding. Processed into a giant recovery center, Rana and her sisters get sent to the hospital the moment the police lay eyes on them, Kieran going with them. They’re gone before Matthew and Dan even have a chance to say goodbye.

Matthew and Dan sit shoulder to shoulder in hard plastic chairs for nearly six hours that first day, thin cotton blankets covering them and eating Monster Munch out of tiny silver bags with their eyes glazed. Someone brings around a trolley filled with donated clothes, they both pick out nondescript jeans and hoodies, want nothing more than to blend in. At some point, Matthew leans his head on Dan’s shoulder, wiping his eyes and not making a sound. Dan puts his arm around him and they hold each other silently.

Matthew shakes Dan awake the second night they’re there, tells him there’s a bus going back to Manchester with other people from the recovery center and he’s getting on it. Matthew leans into Dan’s space on his fold-up camp bed and puts his arms around him again. They don’t say anything, or can’t, Dan guesses. How do you even begin to talk about everything? Dan has no idea and no time to figure it out. Matthew kisses him on top of the head again, just like he did that night outside the shop, and he’s gone.

The morning Dan’s able to go home is chillier than normal. Dan stuffs his hands in the pocket of the hoodie and feels the dry rustle of paper. When he pulls it out, it’s a scribbled note in messy handwriting — _dan, give me a call when you’re ready. i’ll be here. -matty_ — with a row of numbers.

Dan’s vision blurs the longer he stares at it. With trembling hands he folds it neatly back together and puts it in his back pocket.

  
  
  
  
  


It feels almost foreign back home in his flat. Four months total of being away, and there’s a fine layer of dust on everything. A lackluster museum exhibit to a life Dan used to have.

He gets in touch with his mum and his brother, who’d managed to make it home in time. They managed to stay safe in their own home the whole time, and Dan has long and tearful conversations with both of them when the phone lines come back up.

Dan doesn’t reactivate his social media when the internet starts working again. He leaves his laptop hidden in his hall closet, the same place he left it when he fled. Dan glances at the door every time he walks by it, feeling like it’s burning a hole in the back of his mind.

The Opposition had kicked his door in looking for him the night he’d fled, so his kitchen’s in a shambles from foragers plucking his pantry clean. He doesn’t blame them, he thinks. Dan hopes somebody made it through another night with his crackers or pasta or tinned fruit. Picking up a broom and a dustpan, he sets to work.

He has no room for blame or anger anymore in his heart.

Once everything’s off the floor and countertops, Dan finds a rag underneath his sink and lets it run under cold water from the tap. The gas isn’t back on yet in the city, so it’s ice cold. He finds the stripes the wet rag paints in the dust and crumbs somewhat soothing, a methodical, organised action he repeats over and over until everything’s wiped down. He works in silence, trying his best to keep his head empty, but failing.

He moves through the flat methodically, over the span of a few days. The lounge is virtually untouched, some couch cushions gone that Dan is sure helped some forager sleep at night, wherever they ended up. There wasn’t anything of survival value in here, besides that. His bathroom is picked clean, all his hygiene products gone. Dan spends his first night under a cold shower, washing his hair and body with a quarter-bottle of dish soap stowed beneath where he found the rags.

Dan’s amazed to find his bedroom in near-pristine condition. His bed he reminisced over for so many nights is untouched, and when he lays down in the center of it for the first time he feels the prickles of dust against his skin. Body too fatigued to think about getting up to shake it out, Dan feels his eyes close before he even knows what’s happening.

_“What everyday things do you miss most?”_

_Phil asked him this one night after a long watch, too wired now for sleep but keeping their voices low for the benefit of everyone else. They were pressed back to front together on the floor, what’d become their shared bed and under their shared blanket. One of Phil’s arms strung around Dan’s waist, the other supporting Dan’s head as they laid on their sides, the question tickled the side of Dan’s neck where Phil’s mouth had strayed._

_“The most? Oh, God. How much time do you have?” Dan replies, laughing quietly. Phil’s arm comes up in front of Dan’s face, checking an imaginary watch on his wrist._

_“I’d say, all the time in the world,” Phil replies._

_Dan laughs again, swatting down Phil’s arm, his back vibrating with Phil’s silent chuckles._

_“Hot food,” Dan says after a minute. “Proper hot food out of an oven or off the range.” Phil’s voice hums in his ear in agreement, arm tightening around Dan’s middle. “Ice. Domino’s pizza. HBO Now. Spotify. The entire internet, for fuck’s sake.”_

_“I would do anything for a latte from Starbucks,” Phil says, his hand sliding under the hem of Dan’s shirt and painting stripes of warmth across his belly. “Laundry detergent. Haribo. Takeaway. Aircon.”_

_Dan closes his eyes to the gravel of Phil’s voice, mind wandering. “I miss my bed. I have five-hundred thread count sheet, and this mattress topper made of egg-crate type material. There’s loads of pillows, and a soft duvet my mum got me one year for my birthday after I told her it was all I wanted. There’s these organic lavender dryer sheets I use that make the entire bed smell so good. It’s incredible.”_

_A thought blooms somewhere deep in his mind. A place that exists after all this, a point in time where he feels the sheets of his bed again, the way his pillows dip against his head. He imagines Phil is there with him in this simple thought, a fantasy really. When he feels Phil’s hands pushing firmer into the skin under his shirt, matching the soft presses of his mouth against his neck, he leans back into it._

_“Is this talk of pizza and Starbucks and Haribo turning you on, Phil?” he teases. He tips his head back and Phil leans up on his elbow. They meet in the middle, pressed tight together from arms to ankles, mouths achingly close._

_“I think it was you describing your bed in vivid detail that did it, if I’m being honest.”_

_Dan hums a little with well-earned satisfaction, smiling into soft kisses Phil lays against his lips. Bathed in low moonlight seeping in from a crack somewhere along the wall, Dan watches the shine turn the black in Phil’s hair to silver. He slides a hand up and grips at the underside of it as Phil kisses him, the other winding around Phil’s back._

_“I mean, the Domino’s or the Haribo alone would’ve done it alone, but the bed thing really helped,” Phil quips, breaking apart to nose under Dan’s jaw, grinning._

_Dan’s eyes fall shut as he laughs quietly and tips his head back for Phil, feels his chest burn with a full heart._

Back in his bed, Dan lets his eyes fill underneath their lids. He unhinges his thoughts, lets the memories slide out with tears down his face, feels like he’s back in the shed with his arms wrapped around himself and trying to keep his torso in one piece.

Broken and unashamed, Dan mourns.

  
  
  


He dreams about Phil almost every night those first couple of weeks. Sometimes they’re comforting images, the deep sound of Phil’s voice telling him a story while they’re on watch in the back of the shop, the sight of him across the room laughing with Matthew, the sweet taste of warm kisses against his lips.

But more often than not, they’re nightmares. Dan feels Phil’s hand slip out of his in every terrorising incarnation of these, the slide of skin on skin and the overflow of panic as Phil moves farther and farther away from him.

He’s always yelling. He screams for Phil, until his chest aches and his throat is raw. _“Dan!”_ Phil matches him this time. He hears the sound of the shop window breaking, glass hitting hardwood like sand. _“Dan! Help me, Dan!”_

Dan shocks awake. He takes great gulps of air to catch his breath, gasps in the dark as his flat slowly comes into focus around him. There’s rain coming down outside now, the sound through his cracked bedroom window loud against the street and the pavement and somehow comforting. It’s first they’ve had since the Opposition was overthrown, and Dan thinks off-handedly that he’s grateful for the new beginning.

He turns onto his other side, pushing a hand through sweat-damp curls and pulling the duvet to cover his bare shoulder.

_“Dan! Dan Howell!”_

Dan’s body jumps again. _Fuck,_ he thinks. He’d just started to drift off.

_“Dan!”_

_“Fucking shut up already, it’s midnight and whoever Dan is he’s not going to answer, mate!”_

Two voices are outside his window, arguing over the pounding rain, and Dan’s already on his feet, clamoring towards his window to tear the blinds open.

“Sorry!” He hears the voice say, a long pause until it speaks again. “Dan!”

The window of the flat just below him closes with an angry huff, and Dan’s eyes land on the figure shouting from the pavement.

Phil’s under a giant, curve-handled black umbrella, gazing up at Dan’s building. He’s hard to make out through the pelting rain, but Dan sees him scanning the windows, looking for signs of life along the darkened façade. He’s in a black hooded jumper and jeans, arm holding up the umbrella in a bright white cast from wrist to elbow.

Dan doesn’t even bother with a shirt. He streaks out of his flat, barely remembering to grab his key off the wall to avoid getting locked out as he tears down the three flights of stairs to the street.

Phil hears the door fly open before he sees him. He looks over and suddenly Dan’s out of the building, body framed by the doorjamb and staring at Phil in unbearable disbelief.

_he’s not dead. he’s here. this isn’t a dream. he’s here. he’s not dead._

Then he’s there in front of Phil, pyjama pants soaked through almost instantly, curls dripping and matted to his forehead. Phil puts his umbrella over them both, uses his uninjured arm to bring Dan close. Dan’s heart beats against his throat, erratic and irregular and he has to touch him, just to make sure he’s there and he’s alive and Dan’s not dreaming.

The rain pounds their tiny, umbrella-shaped bubble. Dan lifts his shaking hands to Phil’s face, tracks his eyes between Phil’s. He slides them down, fingers sifting through the black hair at Phil’s temples and squeezing at the nape of his neck. He feels solid, warm, wholly corporeal.

“Tell me you’re really here,” Dan whispers.

Phil holds Dan to him by his lower back, kisses him fully over and over again, wet with rain and open-mouthed. He doesn’t stop until Dan’s arms are wound tight around his neck, their foreheads pressed together, soft inhales and exhales of shared breath.

“I’m here,” Phil promises. “I’m here.”

  
  
  


Dan barely lets him go long enough to get them both upstairs. They shake out Phil’s umbrella and leave it in the hall, detouring to the bathroom only long enough to get towels and hang up Dan’s soaked sweatpants. In his bedroom, Dan fishes a clean pair of pants from his top drawer, changing into them quickly in a dark corner of his room while Phil struggles to get his hoodie off.

“Let me help you,” Dan says when he’s changed back into dry pyjama pants, navigating Phil’s large cast back through the small opening at the wrist of the sleeve. He has another pair of pyjamas over his shoulder, and when they get Phil’s hoodie and t-shirt off, his hands fall to the clasp on Phil’s jeans.

He tries to hurry so it’s not awkward, fingers working on the button and pulling the zipper down in one pull, when he feels Phil’s hand on his. Dan looks up from their waists and into Phil’s eyes, questioning.

“Thank you,” Phil says quietly. The room’s charged again, energy between them crackling and hot. Dan’s body is way ahead of his mind, brain not quite caught up that Phil’s actually okay and alive and _here_ , but everything inside him ready to keep going.

He lets his body win out. Dan winds a hand around the back of Phil’s neck and pulls him in, pressing their mouths together over and over, biting at Phil’s lower lip. His left hand dips below the loosened waistband of Phil’s jeans, and he presses their hips together.

“I just realised we’ve never been alone in the same room,” Dan says, pushing at the waistband so the denim finally falls to the floor in a puddle around Phil’s bare feet. “I think we should just camp out here for a while.” Phil nods and keeps kissing him, steps out of the jeans and walks towards the edge of Dan’s bed.

Dan grips at the elastic around Phil’s hips and leans forward, trying to edge Phil onto the bed and only succeeding in tripping, kneeing Phil in his balls, and pinning Phil’s left — casted — arm underneath him.

“Ow!” Phil cries out in reflex, bones still being knit together under the cast jerking painfully. Dan jumps away from him on the bed and holds his hands up.

“Oh God, are you okay?!”

Phil’s clutching his arm in pain, eyebrows furrowed and hairline dewy with sweat, and suddenly he starts laughing into Dan’s pillow.

He’s shocked a minute, then Dan joins in. They laugh until they’re red in the face, wiping tears from their eyes.

It feels incredible. He hasn’t laughed like this in weeks, not since he last saw Phil, before his life had been turned upside down for the second time.

“Can’t believe I’m in the famous bed,” Phil remarks finally. “I have to admit, it’s incredibly comfortable.”

Dan burrows down beneath the duvet, against soft pillows. He smiles when Phil does the same, careful to keep his casted arm still. “I told you.”

Dan lays a hand softly against the white plaster, taking great care to be gentle. “What happened?”

Phil takes a deep breath in and lets it out. “We didn’t get far in the car after we left you, maybe a few miles. I bit one of the guys and he pushed me out of the moving car.”

Dan winces. “Fuck.”

“Yeah. Luckily we weren’t going too fast. Also that guy tasted terrible.”

Dan barks out a laugh, and Phil grins again. “Eventually, I made my way back to the shop on foot. My mates from uni were still there, they’d scared off the rest of the guys who broke in, but we didn’t think it was safe to stay there anymore.”

A shadow passes over Phil’s face. “I didn’t see where you’d gone but my mates said you were with Matthew and Kieran and the girls and they knew you got away. We packed up and left and walked in the direction they’d seen you go, but we couldn’t find you. I’m so sorry I couldn’t find you, Dan.”

Dan leans in and presses their lips together softly. It’s not a time to apologise for, not when everything was going on and nobody knew what really happened. Phil holds him close as he rolls on his back, pulling Dan’s arm over him, who happily complies. Dan snuggles into Phil’s side, lays his cheek down on Phil’s bare chest and breathes deep. Injured arm safely on his other side, Phil kneads delicate fingers through the rain-damp curls on Dan’s head.

“I thought my arm was just sprained or something so we put it in a splint and wrapped it as best we could. We started making our way towards Westminster and found out my mate’s mum who works in the House of Lords was okay, and organising a revolt from the inside. Before the week was up, the Opposition had fallen.”

Phil says it all quickly, like he’s eager to let the past stay there. Dan can’t blame him.

“When the police came and found us, we all got separated. I knew Rana was getting better and Kieran planned to stay with the girls temporarily. I haven’t…” Dan trails off. How does he explain not trying to find them and reach out to them, re-connect with people who helped save his life?

Phil seems to understand, somehow. “Matty’s had the same mobile phone number since secondary school so I’ve had that memorised pretty much my entire life. When service came back up he was the first one I called from the hospital. He’s okay, back home in Manchester now. Rana’s still in the hospital, with Nadia and Kieran and Inaam there in shifts, but she’s going to be okay, too. We were both at Princess Grace. I was just discharged tonight, I came here to you first.”

They lay there silent for a long time. The storm outside doesn’t let up, only serves as the static background music to their soft and warm embrace. Dan can’t stop his hands from skating, Phil’s shoulder to his inner elbow, soft belly to pointed hip, chest to collarbone. He’s afraid to let him go again.

“How did you find me?” Dan asks, leaning back on Phil’s shoulder to look up at him.

Phil smiles softly. “You told me you lived above a vegan bakery in a dodgy part of London. I just Googled.”

Something breaks apart inside Dan. Like plates shifting on the earth’s surface, it sends a current across his body, an electric shock out through his extremities.

“I want to call Matthew tomorrow,” Dan says. “And visit Rana.”

Phil nods, carefully. “I think they’d like that very much.”

Dan gets as close as he can to Phil without jostling his casted arm, presses his damp cheeks into the crook of Phil’s neck and exhales in relief when Phil gets his arms around him fully.

“It’s over now, Dan,” he says quietly. “You’re home.”

 _Home._ It’s an abstract sort of word, more than just where you sleep at night, or who lays next to you. But Dan knows it’s true.

He’s home now.

  


 

 

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [twitter](http://twitter.com/kay_okays) and [tumblr](http://kay-okays.tumblr.com/tagged/*mine) xoxo
> 
> thank you for all the nice things you say about my fics. <3


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